Payday 3's community manager has confirmed that the game will require an internet connection at all times to play, which has left fans unhappy and even caused some to cancel their pre-orders in protest.
If there's one thing that 2023 has shown us, it's that we can expect more and more games to confirm that they will always require an internet connection to play, with some key examples this year including Redfall and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. As the developers are well-aware by now, those announcements did not go down well at all, something that the team behind Payday 3 has just become painfully aware of.
Yesterday, Payday's community manager Almir Listo streamed himself playing Payday 2 and took the time to answer some questions about the upcoming third game, which is now just a matter of months away. Early in the stream, Listo is asked whether Payday 3 has offline play, which he confirms isn't the case, suggesting that it's due to the cross-play and cross-progression systems in the game.
Listo said, "You will be able to play by yourself, but I do believe that you will have to have a connection in order to play because it's made in Unreal Engine, it's using cross-progression, cross-play, I do believe you'll need to be online to play."
As is the case every time this kind of announcement gets made, fans have been left incredibly unhappy about the news and the Payday subreddit is currently full of posts about the always-online requirement. Many of the same complaints made towards other always-online games have been made here, such as the possibility of the game one day becoming unavailable to play if the servers go offline, game progress being lost if a connection is lost, and it being a rough gaming experience for anyone outside of a city.
While the subreddit is generally very unhappy about the requirement, some fans are actually trying to take action against the game by cancelling their pre-orders to show Starbreeze how they feel about the decision. One popular post on the subreddit right now comes from Redditor StealthC0bra, who urged other fans to "vote with your wallet" and cancel their wish lists and pre-orders, saying that it's "probably the only way OVK/Star-breeze will listen to the community".
It seems that's what some players are planning on doing now too, with one even saying that they're going to wait at least six months to play the game now, and others saying that they "dodged a bullet" now that online-DRM has been confirmed.
